Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs’ dove-winged races –
Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome,
Plucking the splendid robes of the passers-by, and with pitiful faces
Begging what Princes and Powers refused: – “Ah, please will you let us go home?”
Punch and Judy, through no fault of their own, had lost all their world […] They wanted Papa and Mamma gone to Bombay beyond the seas, and their grief while it lasted was without remedy.
Just short of his sixth birthday, Kipling and his three-year old sister Trix boarded a boat in Bombay bound for England with their parents Alice and Lockwood Kipling. After a short stay with various relatives, the children were taken to a boarding house in Southsea and left in the care of Sarah Holloway. Six years would pass before either of them saw their mother again. To our twentieth-century eyes such an act is shocking, but it was usual at that time for Anglo-Indian parents to send their children ‘Home’ for a spell to counteract the supposedly negative influence of their Indian servants. A contemporary of Kipling's, Maud Diver, now largely forgotten but hugely popular during her writing life (she was a favourite of the Royal Family), writes of the well-established practice of Anglo-Indian expatriates sending children back to England:
She will be zealous in guarding her children from the promiscuous intimacy with the native servants, whose propensity to worship at the shrine of the Baba-log is unhappily apt to demoralize the small gods and goddesses they serve […] the sooner after the fifth year a child can leave India, the better for its future welfare. One after one the babies grow into companionable children. One after one England claims them, till the mother's heart and house are left unto her desolate.
In this respect Lockwood and Alice Kipling were no different from their contemporaries. But for the children, the consequences of such an accepted social practice were devastating. Kipling's sister Trix underscores Kipling's fictionalised children's fears in her account of their Southsea experience. Trix, throughout her life, supported her brother's version of events, the validity of which has been questioned by critics; the pain and trauma of abandonment is terrifyingly present in both her and her brother's fictional accounts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rudyard Kipling's FictionMapping Psychic Spaces, pp. 32 - 62Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015